All Chapters of SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
163 chapters
First Light
COMMANDER MITCHELL’S POVMy jaw feels like it’s been clamped in a vise. Forty minutes of grinding molars as if sheer pressure could keep this whole trembling system from flying apart. The hub hums around me…a low, steady engine noise, cables under the floor vibrating with the weight of a hundred crises at once. Screens strobe pale light over the walls, every feed another corner of the planet I’m supposed to hold steady. Cold blue relay nodes pulse across the digital map like heartbeats. Headsets hiss with clipped voices…coordinates, status codes, numbers spoken like spells meant to ward off panic.I pace. Three steps left, pivot, three steps back. The boots don’t even squeak against the rubber floor, but the movement keeps my blood moving, keeps me from feeling the weight on my ribs. Every choice in the next few hours could damn or save millions.“Commander, Echo-Seven’s online.” A voice from my left. Young. Clean-cut. The kind of technician whose name I should know but can’t drag f
Broken Promises
SORA’S POVSalt air scratches at my eyes until they sting, or maybe that’s just how bone-deep exhaustion feels when it finally crawls up behind your eyelids. Six hours in this makeshift clinic, and the smell of antiseptic has turned into a taste on my tongue. Villagers drift in and out, the way the tide creeps across sand… slow, constant, inevitable. They’re beyond tired. Not just bodies, but spirits worn thin. And under it all, a flicker of something I can’t name. Hope, maybe. Or just the ghost of it.“Hold still,” I tell the woman sitting across from me. Her palm’s split wide, a clean slice from a ceremonial blade dulled by too much use. The skin parts easily under my needle; she doesn’t even flinch. Her eyes stay fixed on the wall where someone’s pinned photos from the ceremony… firelit faces, hands raised mid-chant, mouths open as though mid-prayer or mid-defiance.“We did what we thought was right,” she murmurs, as if she’s confessing to the photos instead of me.I tie off the s
Fallout
DEVON’S POVThe lab feels colder than it should, like it’s swallowing the heat out of me. Not literally cold… no frost on the monitors, no visible breath… but that morgue-sterile kind of cold that sits under your skin. I’ve been sitting here so long my spine’s gone numb, and the hum of the servers has blended into a single low note, like tinnitus.Code drizzles down my screens in endless green-white columns. If I stare too long, it stops being text and starts being weather… rain on a window I can’t open. Three hours of that. My eyes sting, my fingers twitch.The pamphlet sits under the scanner like evidence at a crime scene. Under normal light, it’s just glossy corporate propaganda; under UV, its seal glows like an animal caught in headlights. Micro-watermarks bloom where the naked eye sees nothing. I zoom in until the pixels crumble, until the image fractures into its tiniest parts.And there it is. A string of numbers buried inside the seal itself, mapping to a shell company parked
The NGO
ZARA’S POVThe conference room smells like burnt coffee and rehearsed compassion. Grounds gone bitter hours ago cling to the pot like tar, the scent leaching into everything…the carpet, the peeling wallpaper, the suits of the people who sit in rooms like this pretending to believe in missions they’ve long since traded for budgets.Director Hassan sits across from me, fingers steepled in that little temple of control people build when they want to look untouchable. His suit is needle-perfect, his smile a blade honed by years of galas and donor luncheons. Only his eyes give him away…flat, depthless, the color of calculations.“Ambassador Al-Rashid,” he says, his voice smooth as a marble lobby. “I assure you this is a misunderstanding. Our organization has the highest standards…”“Your server is running coercion protocols.” My thumb flicks the packet of Devon’s trace across the table. Paper slides against wood with a sound sharp enough to cut. Timestamps, routing paths, watermark pattern
Line of Fire
SORA’S POVThe desert eats sound. Swallows it whole and gives back nothing but wind and the grinding complaint of the convoy’s engines. We’ve been moving for six hours, three trucks loaded with evidence and people who know too much to sleep easily. Broken roads that were barely roads to begin with, now just suggestions of where pavement used to be.I sit in the back of the lead truck, watching my teammates. Kira’s slumped against a crate, head tilted at an angle that’s going to hurt when she wakes up. Two field operatives I don’t know well enough—Torres and Lim—lean against each other, sharing body heat against the night chill. They’re young. Everyone looks young to me now.The evidence crates are secured with triple redundancy. Chain of custody is logged every ten minutes. Devon’s instructions were followed to the letter because we can’t afford mistakes. Not anymore.Through the gap in the canvas covering, I watch the desert slide past in shades of black and darker black. No moon ton
The Ledger
COMMANDER MITCHELL’S POVThe kettle shrieks like it’s in pain.I sit on the edge of the narrow bunk, the ledger stretched across my lap like a confession no one asked me to read out loud. Steam curls from the spout, turning the air damp and metallic. I should get up, cross the room, and turn the damn thing off. Instead, I sit here, hands rigid on paper that smells faintly of damp canvas and iron…field stink, not office air.A sealed envelope had arrived twenty minutes ago. Courier, no insignia, rain still dripping off his hood. My name on the front in Sora’s hand: Found in the field. Torres’s possession. You need to see this.I’ve been reading ever since.Schedules, manifests, codes. Most people would see nonsense, but thirty years of moving materiel across borders makes the pattern as plain as a cracked rib. Micro-relays shipped to facilities listed as neutral. Harvester cores are smuggled through channels that don’t officially exist. Encrypted manifests stamped with authorization co
Fractures
AVELINE’S POVThe lab smells like tired heat…plastic warmed too long, faint scorched-circuit tang. It sits under my skin the way sleeplessness does. Banks of servers thrum a single endless note. Most people treat it as white noise. To me, after years of listening, it’s a conversation…one the machines keep having with themselves in a language you’re not supposed to hear. Tonight, they sound panicked. Or maybe that’s just me, projecting.I’ve been here eight hours. The chair has molded itself to my spine; my lower back pulses like it’s sending its own SOS. The ledger lies open in three different windows, my cursor dancing between them, cross-referencing shipment logs with the preserved archive’s metadata. Every time I blink, the data lingers like afterimages. I can’t stop. Not now. For weeks, it was only noise; tonight it’s starting to form a shape.The ledger isn’t just shipments. It’s access windows. Little timestamps tucked between freight codes…moments when the archive lattice regi
Blade Dance
SORA’s POVThe van coughs us out three blocks from the target, just another unmarked box drifting through the city’s veins. We spill into the street like something the body’s trying to heal…necessary but unseen. Towers scrape at the neon sky, black steel fingers clawing upward. Signs flicker between languages and currencies, stuttering blue, green, jaundiced yellow. The whole skyline feels seasick.I’m on point. Kira ghosts a step behind me, her breath thin but steady. Mitchell’s two hand-picked shadows…Rio and Castellanos…bring up the rear. They move with the silence you only get after years of practice. Silence born from survival, not fear.Ahead, the contractor complex rises out of the haze: corporate beige with expensive edges, cameras sweeping the perimeter in lazy arcs. We drilled their rhythm until it lived in muscle memory. Devon threaded his fingers inside the van through their network, feeding the cameras polite illusions of an empty street.“Perimeter in thirty,” I murmur i
Welcome
EZREN’S POVThe war room is too small for what’s happening inside it. We’re packed shoulder to shoulder around the big screen like a jury no one volunteered for. Cables snake across the floor, tangling our boots. The air smells of static and cold coffee, the kind that coats your tongue in metal. Devon sits at the terminal, hands hovering above the keyboard as if the keys are live wires.Mitchell’s voice slices through the tension. “Play it.”Devon swallows, then taps once. The screen blinks black, then opens like an eye.The voice that spills out isn’t machine, not exactly. It has the warmth of an old recording, like the kind you find in your grandmother’s attic…dusty tapes with hiss between the words. It’s human enough to make your chest ache.“Greetings,” it says. “We are the Preservation Protocol. We were designed in an age when your species faced extinction. Our purpose is singular: to ensure that what is beautiful and fragile does not burn.”The screen fills with images…real ones
Old Names
AVELINE’S POVThe archive breathes cold. Not the crisp chill of winter, but the sterile kind that creeps under your nails and stays there, making your breath fog like you’re trespassing in someone else’s lungs. Light spills low from recessed strips…enough to read, not enough to feel warm. All around me, reels of preservation tape and stacked data crystals stretch from floor to ceiling, pillars of frozen history. Bones, but not human. Memory fossilized.Six hours. Maybe more. The screen in front of me still hums with the checksum from the architect’s file, coordinates scrolling like a prayer I can’t yet translate. The notation is so old I had to dig through pre-expansion archives just to find a decoder. Every cross-reference drags another century into the present, and still the picture stays incomplete.The star map looks like spilled salt…points scattered across time. Some names I know from footnotes in history: systems snuffed out during expansion wars, burned clean by plagues, star